> Most of the texts of the great library were likely copies of the> Illiad and Odyssey. By all accounts there were a great redundancy> among the books (keeping many versions was of course a good way of> getting around copier's mistakes).>> Would the hellenic culture have brought us to a technological> revolution a millennium earlier if the library had remained? I> seriously doubt that, because the problems of classical technological> development were more social and cultural. A widespread view among the> thinkers that practical work was beneath them and that abstract ideas> with no empiricism was the most elegant form of knowledge,> anti-rational mystery cults, a society based on slavery and heavily> centralised command economies were some of the reasons the library> doesn't appear to have been the key to technological development.>> Still, one can dream about a world where Archimedes wasn't killed and> his tradition lived on, uniting with the Epicurean ideas described by> Lucretius. Then we might have been on our way towards the stars in> nanotech spaceships now. And half the crew would be named Marcus,> Gaius and Titus :-)